Review: Kyocera Jet for Amp'd

The main menu arranges all the functions on a ring, rotating clockwise by pressing down on the D-pad (and counter-clockwise by pressing up). The unfortunate part of this arrangement is that while the ring is rotating, the menu items momentarily disappear. This means that when you attempt to move quickly through the main menu, you can't tell what function you're going to stop on.

Thankfully the main menu can be changed to display a grid of icons or a simple list, which is the default for all the secondary menus. The menus also feature a total of nine different color themes, and the particularly nice feature of previewing a new color palette by simply scrolling to a different one, without having click an additional button to select it.

The Jet's menu system feels slow and out of date given the slick Amp'd Live online experience. We were upset with the difference in resolution and sense of quality in Live service compared to the phone's own menu system. Aside from the music player, which benefits from the Amp'd design, all of the Jet's other applications use Kyocera's traditional interface. This feeling of having two drastically different user interfaces in one device was really disappointing.